@DanLinnaeus Celebrated!

The concept of collective agency in Zion is incipient to Jewish memory and tradition. It’s not a modern add on. It’s a constitutive axis of a diachronically continuous identity across millennia. Even Herzl’s preface of Der Judenstaat says the idea his pamphlet develops is a “very old one.” Jewish people have realized this through tribal confederacies, kingdoms, commonwealths and even suzerainties under imperial occupations. Modern day Israel is merely a Westphalian era expression that arose amid the Spring of Nations. In that sense the Oxford, Merriam-Webster, and Britannica definitions of Zionism as a 19th c. political movement are foundationally ahistorical and incomplete, though the latter notes it is “in many ways a continuation of the ancient attachment.” The problem is that these intentional accounts cleave a constitutive axis of Jewish identity as optional, a jurisdictional intervention that violates a self-determined people’s right to self understanding. An empirically grounded account of what Zion actually connotes as an ‘ism’ to Am Israel is encapsulated in the basic idea of Jewish freedom in Zion (herut be-Zion) as constitutive of Jewish self-understanding and collective memory, one that has remained intact across millennia despite constrained political capacity. This speaks to a profound friction in modern discourse between external categorization and internal ontology that permits scholars to treat Zionism as a modern political graft ignited by the Dreyfus Affair, when Jewish history remains unintelligible to its own people without an account of Zion’s centrality and a fiat intervention that posits the lived reality and essence of a people as an excisable ideological option is itself political, harmful and incendiary. The definitions themselves that time-bound and gag what Zionism can mean to Jewish people is an act of coercive boundary setting that a follower of Derrida might well frame as the violent hierarchy of text. Who holds authority over how a Jew may understand his Jewish identity if not the Jewish people as a nation? Without integrating Zion into the historical memory of the Maccabean revolt, the Hasmoneans, the Bar Kochba revolt, the various waves of medieval returns, and the autonomous Jewish communities under Ottoman or Byzantine rule, the rise of Zion from the ashes of history amid the Spring of Nations lives as a ghost story -- an ethereal movement without a body, a modern political caprice of an oppressed people. The Jewish nation can and should exclaim intentional sovereignty over Zion and Zionism, as one immutable core that belongs to collective self-understanding.